The longevity of a business depends on its marketing strategy and its ability to predict the market demands by studying consumer demographics. Marketing is considered to be a creative industry and includes aspects like advertisements, trend analysis, strategies, researches, promotions, product awareness, distribution and selling.
When studying marketing, you can opt for specialization like advertisement and branding, direct marketing, international marketing, public relationships, communications, strategic management, market research, events organization, database marketing and search engine marketing. Two major objectives of marketing are the recruitment of new customers and the retention and expansion of relationships with existing customers. For a marketing plan to be successful, the four ‘Ps’ must reflect the consumer’s wants and desires in the targeted segment. Trying to convince a market segment to buy something which they don’t want or need is very expensive and often not successful. The American Marketing Association (AMA) states, 'Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives'. Marketing is now a very essential part of any business.
The four ‘Ps’ are product, pricing, promotion and placement. These four elements are often referred to as the marketing mix and the marketer can use these to formulate a marketing plan. The four Ps model is most useful when marketing low value consumer products. Industrial products, services, high value consumer products require adjustments to this model. Marketing is now more about outside-in rather than the traditional inside-out perspective where the viewpoint is that of the company looking out. The extended marketing mix has three more Ps to add, people, process and physical evidence. With the advent of the IT age, internet today has entered all aspects of life. Four new 'Ps' were formed, personalization, participation, peer-to-peer and predictive modeling. The most important factor is consumer focus. Generally there are three way of doing it, the customer-driven approach, the sense of identifying market changes and the product innovation approach. Marketing research, corporate branding and public relations are increasingly being seen as vital marketing tools and a socially and environmentally aware general public and media. One of the most criticized marketing parts is the promotion. Product promotions essentially involves an attempt from the supply side to influence the market and yield profits which otherwise would not have been realized under the free market.
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